In democratic countries, governmental officials are chosen by the citizens in an election. Conducting an election and voting for candidates for public office can be performed in several different ways. One such way utilizes mechanical voting machines at predetermined polling places. When potential voters enter the predetermined polling place, voting personnel verify that each voter is properly registered in that voting district and that they have not already voted in that election. Thus, for a voter to cast his vote, he or she must go to the polling place at which he or she is registered, based on the voter's residence. Another method for conducting an election and voting utilizes paper ballots that are mailed to the voter who marks the ballot and returns the ballot to the voting authority running the election through the mail. In the usual vote by mail process, the voter marks the ballot to cast his/her vote and then inserts the ballot in a return envelope which is typically pre-addressed to the voter registrar office in the corresponding county, town or locality in which the voter is registered. The voter typically appends his/her signature on the back of the envelope adjacent his/her human or machine readable identification.
In a typical vote by mail system, the envelopes that are returned to the registrar's office which include completed ballots undergo two separate processes. The first process is an authentication process in which the signature of the voter provided on the return envelope is verified against his or her registration signature. If the signatures match, the return envelope including the completed ballot is stored for later counting. If the signatures don't match, or if the signature is missing from the return envelope, an investigation is commenced during which the registrar normally contacts the voter. Typically, the signatures provided on the back of the return envelopes are verified without revealing the ballot inside. The second process occurs at the closing of the election and consists of the counting of the votes from all of the ballots that have been received in return envelopes that have been authenticated as just described. Typically, the authenticated return envelopes are loaded onto a machine that opens the envelopes, extracts the ballots, reads the ballots, tallies the votes, and outputs the emptied envelopes and the ballots into two separate bins (the ballots then may be further divided into two sub-bins, one for the ballots successfully read and one for the ones that fail to be read properly).
In current vote by mail systems, the voter has no way to know whether his or her returned ballot actually reached the registrar's office, was counted, and was in fact counted as intended. In some recent elections, there have been reports of absentee ballots that have been lost or forgotten behind at the registrar's office, for one reason or another, and, as a result, have not been counted. In order to gain more confidence from voters, there is a need for a system which gives the voters assurances that their votes have not been lost and have entered the vote tallying process and been counted as intended. This is especially true as voting by mail becomes more prevalent (apart from the usual absentee voting). In fact, in some jurisdictions, entire elections are being conducted exclusively by mail. Thus, their exists a need for a vote by mail system that allows voters to verify that their votes as indicated on a returned ballot have been received and counted as intended.